The finishing touches have been put in place and nuVue 2.0 is ready for public consumption. As promised, this release opens the door to more (and future) functionality for users who share their libraries with others. At the moment, this is only for Plex users, but support of Emby Connect and all of its media sharing-is-caring goodness is just around the corner. Now fully supporting both Plex and Emby Connect! So, without further ado, we introduce you to:

You can’t stop progress! The latest nuVue beta has been released that includes trial support for the upcoming Pay-It-Forward premium features. These are targeted at server owners who share their libraries–right now, just Plex users; but Media Browser will have its turn too. If you are sharing your libraries with other users, you will see a new section in the settings:

We’re another step closer to nuVue 2.0 and ready to let our users have a hands-on experience with the newly added nuVue messaging feature. At the moment, this is just for Plex users who make use of shared libraries. Since the announcement of our 2.0 roadmap, Media Browser has also added library sharing capabilities. Our plan is to give this new ability a little time to settle and stabilize before we add support in nuVue. But on to the good stuff…

The next major release of nuVue is in various stages of design, proof-of-concept, and development. Normally, I’d say it’s a bad idea for a developer to share too much information about upcoming features. There’s always the chance that something unexpected will happen and your already-announced feature never sees the light of day. (Think angry mobs with torches and pitchforks.) Or that you will now have to answer all the “when will it be released?” questions. (The answer is always, “when it’s done”.) But, in this case, I’d like to give the community at-large a chance to shape the future of nuVue. Oh, and maybe stir up a bit of hype for the app at the same time.

One of the differentiating features of Plex is its ability to share libraries with other users. Given enough storage, horsepower, and bandwidth, any Plex server can become your very own on-demand video streaming service for family and friends. Currently, nuVue works just as well with shared libraries as it does with your own content when it comes to new media notification. But what if it could do more? Read more »

Since adding the ability to start playback on connected clients, by far the top feature request we have received has been to also support playback to Chromecast devices. While we agree fully that this would complete the playback experience from within nuVue, Chromecast is a different beast than “normal” clients. To make a long, technical story short, talking to the Plex or Emby player on the Chromecast device requires knowledge of a couple of identifiers (one assigned by Google) and the messaging API that is being used. These items are typically, and purposely, private–otherwise anyone could write an app to control, for example, YouTube on Chromecast. Many parts of Emby are open-source, and the developers have been willing to share their Chromecast information with us; but Plex is a closed-source project. We reached out the the Plex development team to see if they would consider sharing as well, knowing quite well that the answer could very well be “no”. The official answer I received from Plex employee Chris C was: